Female Ruins

This is Geoff Nicholson's architecture novel. Female Ruins is a dazzling hybrid of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Evelyn Waugh's The Decline and Fall. It's the story of Christopher Howell, a cult architect who allegedly built just one building, and the search for that fabled building--reputedly a wild, willful amalgam of styles ranging from 11th century Norman to 20th century Neutra. Ingeniously built into the narrative are bits of Howell's essays which celebrate the idea of the "Cardboard House" and the architecture of impermanence.

When Howell's daughter--and keeper of his flame--Kelly and a Howell groupie named Jack Dexter hook up in a free-falling love affair, the search for this apocryphal building becomes a search for a lost past. Brilliantly funny and seriously obsessive, Female Ruins shows how the castles we build are often symbols of our owns needs, follies, and magnificent obsessions.

"Geoff Nicholson's knowledge of the subject is sure, his understanding of the design and theories of the past 30 years assured and enjoyably related. None of this, however, should or does get in the way of his very human storytelling."--The Guardian